The Sorting Machine — What did SFFA reveal about 'merit' in college admissions?
Pure-merit<br>seats left
100/100
Every seat is open.
A data dossier
The Sorting Machine
What did SFFA reveal about “merit” in college admissions?
A domestic student at a given academic percentile has a far smaller chance of landing a<br>seat at an elite university, and of paying for it, than an identical student fifty years ago.<br>Admissions are fundamentally zero-sum, so where did these seats go?
One applicant enters at the top. The pegs are the<br>factors: SAT, GPA, sports, legacy, donor, race. The machine sorts each drop into one of two bins, a<br>wide REJECTED and a narrow ACCEPTED . Most land left.
01 · The squeeze
Different doors, wildly different odds.
Every applicant is sorted into a lane before the file is even read, and the gates on those<br>lanes are not the same size. A recruited athlete walks through an opening five-sixths of the way open. The<br>unhooked domestic applicant faces a pinhole . Same university, same year, a roughly 17-fold gap<br>in the odds of getting through.
Admit rate by track: the gate you're sorted into
Applicants stream in from the left; each gate's opening is scaled to that track's admit rate. Watch where the crowd piles up.
SOURCE · Admit rates from Arcidiacono, Kinsler & Ransom, Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard (using Harvard's records in SFFA v. Harvard): recruited athletes 86%, faculty/staff children 47%, dean's-interest 42%, legacies 34%, vs. under 5.5% for non-ALDC applicants. NBER w26316 · full paper. Lane widths (applicant volume) illustrative.
02 · The race gap
The same file, four different verdicts.
The most-cited number from the Harvard trial comes from a counterfactual . The plaintiffs'<br>economist modeled one applicant profile and swapped only the race field. The model's predicted probability of<br>admission moved from 25% to 95% .
Modeled admit probability for one identical applicant, by race
A male, non-disadvantaged applicant at a fixed academic and extracurricular profile, with only the race field varied.
SOURCE · P. Arcidiacono expert report, SFFA v. Harvard: a baseline applicant with a 25% chance as Asian American would have ~36% as white, ~77% as Hispanic, ~95% as African American. See also NBER w27068. Figures are the plaintiffs' model estimates, disputed by Harvard's experts.
This is a modeled probability rather than a real admit rate , and Harvard's experts disputed the specification.<br>But no party disputed the direction: at equal academic strength, the personal-rating and race adjustments<br>did not fall evenly across groups.
03 · Price discrimination
A different price for every family.
The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays. The real price is<br>computed per household from a federal-and-institutional aid formula. This is textbook first-degree<br>price discrimination : the same product, the same seat, sold to each family at the maximum the formula<br>thinks it can extract. Here is the machine that sets your number.
1 · Cost of attendance
$97,985/yr
Tuition<br>Housing<br>Fees
The full sticker: tuition, housing, meals, fees, books, travel, personal. The number the formula starts from.
2 · Aid, set by your SAI
FAFSA + CSS Profile
The FAFSA (and, at elite privates, the deeper CSS Profile ) turns your family's income and assets<br>into a Student Aid Index . Grant aid = cost of attendance − SAI. The SAI is your price floor.
3 · Your price
$0 – $98k
Two students sit in the same lecture. One paid near nothing , the other near $98k . The seat is identical; only the family was re-priced.
What each family actually pays at Princeton, by income
Average net price after grant aid, 2023–24. The 9× jump at the $110k line, then the climb to the full ~$98k, is the cliff.
SOURCE · Avg. net price by income (Princeton, 2023–24): NCES College Navigator. Full cost of attendance ($97,985) — Yale, 2026–27. "Full pay" bar illustrative.
Why the upper-middle class gets hit hardest. The formula's design does the damage: income above a<br>modest protection allowance is assessed at steep marginal rates, and the CSS Profile that elite<br>privates use counts what the federal FAFSA does not: home equity in your primary residence and the<br>non-custodial parent's income . The 2024 FAFSA overhaul also removed the reduction for having two<br>children in college at once . Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full<br>pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing.<br>Dept. of Ed (SAI) · CSS Profile.
04 · Out of sync
Demographic comparisons.
Treat this as an accounting question. Follow each group across three<br>steps: its share of the country's 18-year-olds , its share of all U.S. college students ,<br>and its share of an elite private class . If admission were neutral the three bars would stay<br>level. They don't. Some groups expand sharply at the elite tier while others contract: Asian students roughly<br>quadruple, international...